BETWEEN FRAMES — A CULTURAL CENTER FOR THE SEVENTH ART

Beyond film screenings, the Cultural Center Morelos is conceived as a vibrant place for encounter, education, production, and cultural exchange. Here, architecture and cinema coexist with public life, extending the experience of cinema beyond the enclosed theater and into the everyday life of the community. Courtyards, gardens, shaded passages, terraces, and gathering spaces become essential parts of the project, allowing cultural activities to unfold throughout the building. Ultimately, the project explores how architecture can give physical form to the collective experience of storytelling.

The proposal extends beyond the existing building to integrate the Cultural Center for the Seventh Art with the surrounding urban fabric and two complementary cultural projects developed by other designers in Morelos. Rather than treating each institution as an isolated object, the three projects form a shared cultural network, connected through a sequence of public spaces: Cinema Center → Public Plaza → Museum of Audio → Cultural Link → Casona Spencer. The proposed plaza, courtyards, passages, and intermediate spaces become extensions of the cultural institutions, accommodating screenings, events, gatherings, and everyday encounters. In this way, the project moves beyond the scale of the individual building to connect cinema, sound, heritage, architecture, and public life as part of a continuous urban experience.

Rather than focusing solely on film screenings, the Cultural Center Morelos brings together the many dimensions of cinema within a single architectural experience. The foyer connects the café, museum, video library, shop, auditorium, screening rooms, and event spaces, allowing visitors to encounter cinema through memory, knowledge, projection, dialogue, and collective activity.

The building unfolds as a sequence of experiences, using movement, framing, light, shadow, and transition as spatial instruments: Foyer → Encounter | Museum → Memory | Cinema → Experience | Auditorium → Dialogue | Events → Collective Life. Cinema frames stories; architecture gives them a place to become collective memory.

The proposal does not erase the memory of the former cinema and the collective life it once held for more than 500 people, but allows that memory to continue through use. A diverse cultural program and self-sustaining economic model transform preservation into continuity, enabling the Cultural Center Morelos to evolve and remain active beyond governmental funding. To preserve a place is not to freeze its memory, but to give it the means to remain alive.

Like A New Assembly, this project belongs to an earlier stage of our practice, before our studies of Classical Architecture, traditional construction, and Traditional Urbanism reshaped our approach to existing buildings. The original proposal intentionally contrasted the new intervention with the existing structure.

Our subsequent studies have led us to reconsider this approach, understanding preservation as a deeper engagement with the building’s proportions, materials, construction, and architectural language. We hope to revisit the project through a more Classical and contextually continuous approach, allowing the new intervention to emerge from the logic of what already exists.

The program remains relevant; what has evolved is our understanding of continuity.